Descriptions and decisions

Who says Twitter is just a waste of time? An interesting debate between @jasonnolan and @LM_Campbell on the use of “chemical free” in product description led to a wide ranging discussion all the more impressive by being performed in the140-character ballet of the medium.

@LM_Campbell is quite correct that everything consists of chemicals and nothing is chemical free. @jasonnolan is correct that the vernacular understanding of “chemical free” is “bad-chemical free”.

The problem is that there is no uniform understanding of what is “bad”. As toxicologists say, the dose makes the poison.

Like noise, which is your neighbour’s taste in music, and weeds, which are plants that grow where you don’t want them, bad chemicals are chemicals in the wrong place, wrong amount or wrong time. The distance runner must even avoid too much water, and development of hyponatremia. A proper sodium-potassium balance is vital to body functioning.

@jasonnolan represented the cynical view: “the term ‘chemical free’ is marketing, and when can you ever trust marketing?”

This too is true. A shampoo may claim to make your hair “shiny” despite no quantitative standard of how to measure “shine” or a standard of how “shiny” it has to be to qualify to make this claim.

However there are many words and claims that are made that affect–and are intended to affect–decisions about the assumption of risk. A claim of [something]-free usually is intended to promote consumption by a person unwilling to assume the greater risk of [something]-containing product. In that case, surely there are higher ethical obligations, which is an argument perhaps best referred to an ethicist.

From a human factors engineering perspective, decision-making succeeds when the decision produces a desirable outcome and fails when it produces an undesirable outcome. Decision-making can fail when a person does not perceive, ignores, cannot understand, or gives improper weight to a piece of relevant information. Often, human factors interventions are directed at enhancing situation awareness and supporting accurate mental models, whereby to equip people to integrate incoming information to make good decisions. Decision-making can also fail when the interface between the world and the person interferes with information acquisition. Functionally, it does not even matter whether the missing or misleading information is deliberately compromised or inadvertently not conveyed. In the context of marketing, as well as warning and informational signs, information that is semantically blurry or obscure can interfere as much as information that is literally blurry or obscured.

“No chemicals” is a punchier marketing slogan than “no kryptonite oxide”, and as such it may be completely hopeless to expect better, but it’s poor human factors. Not only does the claim fail to provide enough detail to improve decision making, but the literal inaccuracy contributes to undermining decision-makers’ perceptions of the value of information in general (cf. Chicken Little, also the Boy Who Cried Wolf.) As far as I know, no one has claimed that marketers even aspire to good human factors, but a critique is fair game.

Credibility is a particularly essential prerequisite for warning information even more than for marketing claims. Improving information interfaces including warnings and informational signs will probably always be a work in progress. Tiny, all upper-case font silkscreened onto a bouncing inflatable amusement device and blocked by Billy’s mommy and her giant tote bag may not be accessible information to a patron regardless of the thoroughness and precision of the warnings. Posted description of a ride as “dynamic” and a caution to those with “recent surgery” may not provide enough information for a patron to make appropriate decisions. As a 2008 Master’s thesis study by Greg Sarkisian showed, most patrons are firmly in @jasonnolan’s camp anyway: while being able to recite most amusement ride warnings from memory, they believed them to be simply  the handiwork of lawyers and not really of personal relevance. In support of that perception, they correctly noted that many warnings are the same on every attraction, and are seemingly posted even when not applicable to the specific attraction. Ultimately, the ideal warning and instructional information may be not what is on the sign, but the apparent properties of the thing itself. “Your mind sees more / Than what your eyes see.” (Figment, 2002).